I promised I would return to this, and it is time.
When a thousand religious leaders gathered at the United Nations for the Millennium World Peace Summit, Kofi Annan stood before them and said something that has stayed with me ever since. Religion, he told that hall, is not itself to blame: “the problem is usually not with the faith, but with the faithful.”
He said it gently. He was not scolding anyone in that hall. But he had spent his life watching what human beings do to each other, and he had noticed what everyone in that room already knew and few outside it will say plainly: that in nearly every atrocity committed in the name of God, God had nothing to do with it.
Consider what the traditions actually teach.
The Torah commands you to love your neighbor once; the Sages counted thirty-six times that it commands you not to wrong the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Jesus, asked to name the greatest commandment, gave two, and the second was your neighbor. The Qur’an says that whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity. The Buddha taught that hatred is never appeased by hatred; only by non-hatred is hatred appeased, and this is a law eternal. Many Hindu traditions hold that the divine dwells within every being, a conviction carried in the simple act of bowing to another person. Jainism, teaches ahimsa: that no living thing is yours to harm, in thought or word or deed, and that the violence a person does darkens his own soul before it ever reaches anyone else. Guru Nanak began langar, and his successors built it into an institution: a kitchen where anyone of any caste or creed sits on the same floor and eats the same food. It was never charity. It was theology you could eat.
Fourteen traditions in the Council I serve. Every one of them, arrived at independently, across continents and centuries, with no ability to consult each other: the other person is sacred, and mercy is not optional.
That is not a coincidence. That is the closest thing humanity has to a finding.
So when someone straps that inheritance to a bomb, or a border, or a burning house of worship, let us be precise about what has happened. Nothing in the faith produced it. The faith was raided. Someone reached into a tradition that spent a thousand years teaching people to protect the stranger, pulled out a single verse with its context torn off, and used the authority of the sacred to sanctify something the sacred forbids.
I have come to believe this is done less out of conviction than out of convenience. Hatred, on its own, is a hard sell; most people, left alone, do not want to hurt their neighbors. But hatred wearing the clothing of the holy is a different product entirely. It converts a grievance into a duty. It tells a frightened man that his worst impulse is actually his highest obligation. There is no faster way to move a population, and the people who understand this are not confused about their scripture. They are using it. The distortion is not a misreading. It is a theft, and it is deliberate, and the faithful who fall for it are the second victims, not the authors.
Which brings me to why this matters so much for the people I am writing to.
When an outsider denounces the misuse of a religion, however well-intentioned, the denunciation almost always fails, and often makes things worse. To the community being spoken about, it does not sound like a correction. It sounds like an attack on the faith itself, and it confirms the very story the distorters are telling: they hate us, they always have, we are under siege, and only we will defend you. The outsider’s condemnation gets absorbed as evidence. The distortion grows stronger for having been criticized.
There is only one voice that cannot be absorbed that way. It belongs to the leader inside the tradition, with the credentials of that tradition, holding the same book, standing in the same house, who says: I know this text better than the man quoting it to you, and it does not say what he says it says. He is not being devout. He is using you.
No government can say that sentence. No diplomat, no journalist, no well-meaning neighbor of another faith. Only the imam, the rabbi, the bishop, the swami, the monk, the granthi, the acharya. That sentence is a form of authority no institution can confer and none can revoke, and it exists for exactly this purpose, and it is the single most underused instrument in the world today.
I understand why it goes unused. To say it is to invite accusation from within your own community, and the leader who says it is often attacked first by his own. It costs something. It has always cost something. But silence is not neutral either; silence simply hands the microphone to whoever is willing to shout, and what they shout will be attributed to the faith anyway, and to you, and to every believer who never consented to it.
Here is the part that cannot be done alone. A leader who stands up inside his own tradition, by himself, can be dismissed as an outlier, softened, isolated, worn down. But when the leaders of many traditions stand together and each turns to face his own house, something else happens. It stops being one man’s opinion and becomes the settled testimony of the world’s religions about what religion is. Each one disarms the misuse where only he has standing to disarm it, and each one is visibly not alone.
That is what a single room can do. That is what the morning is for.
On August 29, in New York City, One World: One Humanity will convene the world’s most respected faith leaders across fourteen traditions, framed around the dignity we hold in common and the responsibility that follows from it. Part of that responsibility is to take our traditions back from the people who have been using them as weapons, and to do it together, publicly, in one another’s presence.
The faith is not the problem. It never was. But the faith cannot defend itself.
Show up. Stand up. Speak up.
One World: One Humanity convenes August 29, 2026 in New York City, gathering eminent leaders from across the world’s faith traditions. Learn more at wcorl.org/oneworld.